1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the field of application integration, and more particularly, to the generation of components for integrating different enterprise level applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems typically are multi-module software applications which help organizations manage diverse aspects of their business such as product planning, parts purchasing, maintaining inventories, interacting with suppliers, providing customer service, and tracking orders. ERP systems further can manage financial and human resource aspects of a business. For example, Ariba, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., provides a comprehensive business-to-business commerce platform which includes an electronic procurement application known as Ariba™ Buyer.
Presently, some conventional ERP systems exchange information as objects. The Ariba Buyer system, for example, utilizes Java objects for exchanging information with other applications or systems. Although this architecture can provide a robust platform for interaction among disparate applications and systems, conventional ERP system manufacturers typically utilize proprietary object based messaging formats within their ERP systems which are not common to other ERP systems. In consequence, a middleware messaging system often must translate one proprietary ERP system message format, whether an object, XML, or some other message format, to another proprietary ERP system message format. Further, the middleware messaging system often must translate the proprietary objects into an intermediate messaging format used by the middleware itself.
For example, MQSeries™ is a middleware business integration software package available from International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, N.Y. MQSeries provides messaging infrastructure to facilitate interactions between different ERP systems or applications. Through its various software components, MQSeries can provide a communication mechanism between applications on different platforms.
Middleware systems utilize software components referred to as adapters for converting one message format to another. Products such as IBM's MQSeries Adapter Builder, for example, can generate adapters for translating ERP system objects into XML representations. To generate such an adapter, a document type definition (DTD) describing the particular interface to the ERP system must be imported into the adapter generation tool. Unfortunately, many ERP systems do not specify the proper format of an XML representation of the ERP system objects. For example, the Ariba Buyer system does not specify the format of an XML representation of an Ariba Buyer Java object. Such ERP systems do not describe specific interfaces, nor do the ERP systems provide DTDs which are associated with specific interfaces.
In consequence, the DTD must be manually generated so that it can be imported into the adapter builder tool. The manual creation of a DTD, however, introduces the possibility of human error into the creation of adapters. Additionally, the manual nature of the process requires additional time not only for creating the DTDs and adapters, but also for future modifications of the DTDs and adapters.